Follow the bright circle....

Once upon this same earth, beneath this same sun, before you, before the ape and the elephant, before the wolf, the bison and the whale, before the mammoth and the mastodon, in the time of the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs were of two kinds. Some had flat teeth, and fed upon the leaves of trees, and those with sharp teeth, for eating meat, preyed upon the leaf-eaters.

This post was originally going to simply be a comment to Nuraido's & Mathgimp's movie review, but my googling has so sparked my interest and some good memories that I decided to write an entire post.

Land Before Time both rocked my world and broke my heart. I mean, who as a kid didn't sit terrified through the first like five minutes, when Little Foot's mother DIED. And you sat there just thinking, oh crap, I hope my mom doesn't die and I have to go on a journey somewhere. It gets your little kid attention.

The animation is great, as are the characters. And I'm pretty sure to this day, Diana Ross's song "If We Hold on Together" (the song that rolls in the credits) can still bring tears to my eyes.

A few interesting facts I found about the movie:
- Judith Barsi, who did the voice for Ducky, was murdered by her father before the movie was released.
- Steven Spielberg and George Lucas originally wanted the film to have no dialog, like the Rite of Spring sequence in Fantasia. But, to make the film appealing to children, they abandoned this idea, and got actors and actresses to do the voices.
- It's rumored that the original ending was that all five of the young dinosaurs died, with the Great Valley as an interpretation of heaven.
- Spielberg and Lucas believed that some scenes were deemed as too frightening or could even cause psychological damage to young children, about 19 scenes of full animation, mostly pertaining to the Tyrannosaurus rex, and front-on screen sequences of the five young dinosaurs in severe peril or distress were cut or trimmed. Along with the cuts the dinosaurs screams were replaced by milder exclamations.

Now you know. And knowing is half the battle.